Atgxtg

Ow, yeah, that's what used to happen with us. We were using Shinai (bamboo Kendo swords) with winter gloves and quite a few of our blocks and parries ended up sliding down the blade, over the tsuba, and right across the knuckles. Arms and hands got hit way more often than any other party of the body. We got quite a few head hits too, and we were deliberately avoiding head strikes.

Pendragon halved the value of most armors if not worn with padding. So a suit of mail (10 points in Pendragon) would be worth only 5 points without the padding. The tricky but with adding values is that we want to make sure that we don't leapfrog superior armor. For instance a coat of plates,over mail, over an aketon shouldn't be better than full plate.

Fair enough. THere really isn't enough data from testing yet to show things definitely. Most of the exsisting tests tend to be flawed in some way. Either the armor lacks padding, or the target isn't free standing, or the arrowheads are too high qaulity, etc. Yeah, joints are weak spots, the underarms are a big target especially if in plate. ,Just wondering but did your padding extend to your elbows? Not to mention gambeson over mail over an aketon. The idea is that the padding soaks up most of the impact force and the mail prevents cuts or punctures. Plus most medevial mail tends to be better made that a lot of the stuff we see today, since modern mail often isn't rivited. Yeah, one on one duels are a bit different -especially when it comes to targeting. Obviously in a one on one a warrior can target the places that are the most vulnerable to attack. It's possible. The thing is a good arming doublet under the mail was quite effective. Yes, a lot of the ones worn were actually prestty resistant to cutting too. It's kinda like trying to slash someone behind a pillow.

I agree. The thing is that the armor in RQ/BRP is addidtive, but in real life armor doesn't always work that way. For instance, a weapon that can penetrate plate is almost certainly going to have enough energy left over to penetrate whatever is underneath. It's worth 3 points in RQ. BTW, this whole conversation is very similar to what is in Phalanx Games Medieval Magazine #1. Phalax are the folks behind Orbis Mundi, and the magazine is devoted to armor. In the back section the author revises weapon and armor ratings for several RPGs to better match up with current data. One of the games cover is D100/RQ6/Mthras The values are interesting. The author has an aketon (padding) as worth 6 points, a gambeson at 8, and secured mail at 7. But the aketon and gambeson both add +1 to the value of the mail if worn underneath (aketon) or over (gambeson) the mail, for a total of 9. Something like a coat of plates would be worth 9 as well, or +2 if worm over mail. Partial Plate is worth 11. I'm not sure if I entirely agree with the values chosen, but it is an interesting take, especially with some of the changes in weapon damages. Many weapons will need a strong arm, high die roll, and/or a special success to get through armor.

I doubt it. Mail and Gambeson soak up a lot of impact. Telling strokes tend to be on exposed areas and weakpoints. Most strikes tend to be partially defelcted or glacing blows rather than good solid hits.When I used to do it, most of the strikes that we felt were on the hands -the opponent's weapon would tend to slide down the blade and clip the knuckles. It usually didn't do any real damage, but did lead to people dropping their weapons and being exposed.Toss a shield into the mix and a solid hit becomes very unlikely. Remember, if mail didn't work it wouldn't have been used for so long.

Yeah, although it is probably a reflection of the state of knowledge at the time. Tests and studies made since that time have revealed that a gambeson is much more effective that we used to think. Turns out you are usually better off in a gambeson than in mail! At least mail without a gambeson underneath. If I were to rebuild the armor table, I'd probably have a gambeson at 3 or 4 and treat mail as a bonus to the gambeson, rather than as a seperate entry. There aren't many places were you'd wear mail without some padding underneath.

Actually it's not that far off. Keep in mind that damage in BRP isn't linear. That is 8 points isn't hitting twice as hard as 4 points. Otherwise there would be a much bigger difference between weapons. A pistol would do 2-5 times as much as an arrow, a rifle fives times as much as a pistol, and so on. Most armors overlap in places too. Full plate usually has a placard and a breastplate over the chest over an arming doublet (yet another name for an aketon, probably reinforced with mail gossets to protect the joints and other areas that cannot be covered with plate), but all that layering doesn't ever make someone safe against hand weapons. THe existience of leather is somewhat questionable in part because leather doesn't keep for hundred of years. Still, it probably did exist in some form -after all we didn't know about wooden castles until recently as none of them lasted either. I suspect curibouilli (hard) leather probably did exist and it resists cutting better than a gambeson, but it was probably used with a gambeson. Realistically it might be higher. For the most part armor stops weapons, and the severe injuries are caused by striking at the weak points and gaps between pieces of armor. The typical sword strike against a man in mail and aketon is probably going to bounce off harmlessly. At least until some of the mail links give way.

(Breaking exile only long enough to clear the waters I muddied...) Indeed I did.

That's what I do as well. I always considered the new matrix to be flawed, as it comes from Elric! and doesn't quite work right even there. Supposedly the idea behind the new matrix was to streamline and improve upon the weapon breakage rules, but I think RQ3 did it simpler and better.

I have mixed views as to the game system. The size/scaling didn't really work out right (any skilled warrior could carve up dragons with little fear of getting hit), and there were some other bugs to it, but it had it good points. The LOTR and Trek material was good. I think ICON was a better game system overall. Yupp, and a lot of that will depend on the setting and where the GM wants to go with it. I'd probably look at the various Conan RPGs too. Conan seems to have the same viewpoint towards magic as a potentially corrupting influence.

I agree. I think it sort of fits the whole idea of a sorcery reading forbidden lore in his tower and slowly becoming corrupted. I'd probably go take a good look at Decipher's Lord of the Ring RPG. Middle Earth's danger of magic (actually lust for power in general) leading to corruption seems suspiciously close to what you are aiming for. As I have LOTR I did just take a quick look and... In that game a character who get exposed to "dangerous influences" or succumbs to evil tempation may suffer the effects of corruption, which is rated in points. Basically this works out as a Willpower roll opposed by the strong of the temptation. For magic, some spells (typically those that dominate or enslave the target) are considered to be Sorcery, and can lead to corruption, while others (such as healing) do not. Learning sorcery earns a character 1 Corruption Point automatically. There are each casting requires a Willpower roll to resist corruption with the difficulty increasing as the character become more corrupt. Note this this is all based on a system based on 2d6 and not % dice. In BRP terms this could be handled with an opposed Willpower (POWx5%) roll vs Corruption or as a simple WIllpower statl with corruption points being subtracted, much like how CoC handles Sanity. When a character fails the corruption roll he earns additional corruption points based upon the degree of failure and the character must act in an appropriate matter in regard to the corruption (i.e. throttling your cousin to get that nice ring he found). If the Corruption points reach a certain total then the character gets thoroughly corrupt and gets turned into a evil NPC. IN BRP terms this would probably mean greater than thier POW socre, or by having their WIll roll reduced to 0. Anyway, that's one way to handle it.

That's nice. I'm just concerned about stepping on their toes. I mean obviously a beastiary has high potential as commercial product. Ooh, I'll have to look that up.

OH, well if the powers that bee are okay with there beinga collection of free stats for stuff , then I'd be all for it. Heck I've got a lot of anirmal and vehicle stats from various projects that might be useful to someone. THat would make sense. D100 has already had a bit of "bleed through" between game systems. Generally speaking, you can drop a RQ3 bear into Streombringer or CoC without altering much, if anything. Hmm, I've got some notes left over from a bestiary product that I did with another poster who I later lost contact with. I think some of the stuff we did, especially in terms of working up general guidelines to scale creatures based on analogs could prove helpful to other GMs who need to stat up some new creatures, and help to put our stats on the same page. That way my Kodiak Bear stats would be the same (or at least very close to) yours or anyone else's. Well the closer we can keep it to some Chaosium game or other, the better. No sense changing things if we don't have to.

It's one of the three reasons why I didn't buy it (at first). Tae others being that I wasn't aware of it at first, and that when I was made aware of it I thought it was an updated version of the Worlds of Wonder Magic World, not an updated version of Strombringer. I know the feeling. While I liked the revision to the demon rules, I wasn't fond of how attributes got nerfed, all PCs being weapon masters, or the grafting of RQ's battle/sprirt magic system into SB. I'll have to look mosre clsely at my copy. I don't recall any of that, but then I have only skimmed through MW. I think that like many such Chaosium products of that era, it probably would have been nice to have as a way to get ahold of the rules if you didn't have them, but less nice to those who already did.

Yeah, but the question is how much could such a site contain? Since most of the D100 stuff is compatible between games (i.e. stats for RQ port over fairly easily to RQ, CoC and Magic World), just how much could fans put up without stepping on Chasoium's toes? Could we do up a community bestiary? Or would it have to be made more generic?

True. Plus a lot of games only "fail" because somebody pulls the plug on them. The various Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings RPGs comes to mind. Most of those were fairly successful but failed due to licensing issues. Some of us ol' timers still play a lot of "failed" games for one reason or another. A "failed" game isn't necessarily a bad one, just one that for some reason or another isn't available. RuneQuest and Pendragon were in the "failed" category for a number of years. I'll add: 4) Because it was Strombringer 6 with the Young Kingdoms stuff cut out, so to anyone familiar with SB, it was always going to look like a lesser version of "what might have been". That is showed promise only exacerbated the issue for Strombringer fans. It will probably always be looked at as the best version of Strombringer that almost was.

Yes, and that's what probably hurt it. Because if... So those who would appreciate it the most probably already had a previous version of the game. I suspect the main reason why Magic World was released was because Michael Moorcock licensed out Elric to another company, and Magic World let Chaosium reprint the game rules by removing all the Elric/Eternal Champion specific stuff. It's one of the pitfalls of licensed characters and settings - they can be taken away. Stormbringer was always the neglected child at Chasoium. RQ was their main FRPG, until the Avalaon Hill deal went sour. Then CoC became their bread and butter. All things considered, I think we were probably lucky that Magic Word made it to print.

I think Magic's World's "failure" stems mostly from the fact that it came out at a time when Chaosium didn't really give much support anything other than Call of Cthulhu. Strombringer went though five different editions (including Elric!) but didn't really start to get support until Elric! It's become fairly obvious that a game system needs to have published adventure to thrive. All the big RPG lines have lots of adventures that people can buy and run. Games without that end up being niche games in a niche hobby. Another thing that probably hurt MW was the BRP "Big Gold Book". For someone who owned the BGB,or even a previous edition or Strombringer, Magic World just rehashed stuff they already had. There wasn't all that much that was unique to Magic World.

Fortunately I can read without having to sound it out then. More seriously, there is nothing wrong with adapting stuff from other settings and RPGs. Every GM does it to some extent, and even professional writers borrow good ideas and adapt existing stories. Most people didn't think that adapting Romeo & Juliet to modern day New YorK City made West Side Story sound pathetic, so why should you be embarrassed? It's not like you got Russ Tamblin and a bunch of dancers prancing around in the middle of a city street while pretending to be a tough NYC street gang. Uh-oh, I hope I didn't just spoil the next adventure.😳 But they were the most pathetic looking street gang I've ever seen in a movie, and it was based on Shakespeare. They made Sha Na Na and the guys from Grease look tough. All of us suburban kids though, "We could take those guys-and why aren't they getting run over by cars dancing on a city street?"

It can be fun, but there is no guarantee that it will be. Often GMs get so caught in in how great ti would be to do a crossover that they lose sight of how it will play out. I've seen more than one good campaign run into problems when a crossover turned out not to be such a great idea after all. It probably at least as much down to how well the GM can pull it off. I've seen the same concept, even the same adventure, done by different GMs and getting completely different results. Yeah, in the end it's all just a game we play to have fun. Somethings things work out great, sometimes they don't. It's just that at lot of the "big story" stuff has the potential to derail a campaign. That's why when I set up something that could be a game breaker (not just a total part kill, but something that could destroy the campaign) I try to have some sort of backup plan to correct things. Usually two or three such plans. That way if my "fantastic idea" turns sour I have a way to recover before the situation is too far gone. It's one of the perks of making GMing mistakes - you get to learn from them.

And that's just the "Chaos" bit. Factor in the fact that most YK sorcerors aren't nice people, and it doesn't look good. One of the best things we found to help balance out Chaos magic was to port over the "Ki" skills from RQ3: Land Of The Ninja for Agents of Law. Roughly speaking a Ki skill turns the critical chance for a skill into it's own skill. This fits in with Law thematically, as it is the pursuit of repeatable perfection, plus the game benefit actually helps to offset demon abilities.

I agree. The players should usually feel that their characters can do things that will have an impact on the course of events. If not, then there isn't much reason for them to play the game. Now this can be a small impact, especially if the campaign is mostly small scale events such as personal vendettas, local problems and criminals and such, but big multiversal crossover stories sort of drive the story towards large scale events. A GM usually can't set of a big multiversal story full of powerful entities and then run n adventure about finding a specific brand of chocolates for somebody's significant other for Valentine's Day. So if the stories have to "go big", so do the PCs. Pretty much all of the Eternal Champion stories deal with a main protagonist who would very much prefer to do the small scale, mundane stuff, but who is forced by events into becoming a major player on the big stage.

I dunno, I typed it, I didn't say it.😊 What I meant was that not every creative impulse we have should necessarily be followed. Sometimes something that seems like a cool idea isn't, or it actually makes things worse. Mixing and matching settings and characters can be great, but it isn't necessarily so. Much as with any other story/gaming idea it tends to come down to how it's all done. The GM can't just sit back a rely upon the novelty of the crossover to do the work for them. I've seen more than one campaign get messed up or even come to a premature end because a GM didn't really think through the repercussions of some "creative impulse". I've been guilty of it myself on more than one occasion. Now I try to think thins through before I try anything radical, and will usually have some sort of "Plan B" in the wings to salvage the situation should my latest "stroke of sheer genius" not pan out the way I had originally expected. With crossovers it fairly easy to bring in something that completely outclasses the norm for a given setting and winds up relegating the PCs to spectators. Porting Cthulhu over to an Stormbringer campaign is great, until you have to figure out what, if anything, the players can do about it, or what the effects will be if they can do something about it.

That sort of depends on just how those settings work, especially so if they are multiverses. Ultimately there is ususally a need for some sort of overlying universal law that holds sway over the laws of a particular universe. For example, one idea I played with was to combine the Amber setting with that of Moorcock's multiverse and White Wolf's Word of Darkness/New World of Darkness settings. The idea was that the Amberites were the Lords of Law, and the Courts of Chaos represented the Lords of Chaos, It mixed rather well, but just by lining the two it gave the Lords Of Law another level of meaning, and lead to some interesting alterations to both multiverses. WoD/NWoD were a lot easier to integrate. Since WoD has the Umbra (Latin for Shadow) as something of a land between worlds it fit in well with the Amberites. My idea was to have a mage in NWoD who came from the original WoD and got brought to the NWoD setting by Merlin. It was really done as a sort of roundabout eplaination for why the character throught and acted in OWoD terms instead of NWoD terms- and also to show that there was a "deeper" meaning to things beyond the WoD setting. For instance, in that campaign Paradox was not really the subconscious will of the "sleepers" but instead the parameters for that shadow as consciously or unconsciously set by the Amberites. Yes, but sometimes one can come at the expense of the other. Players might not approve or or like just how a GM mixes and matches the settings, with one typically lessening the other. For instance if a GM were to mix, say James Bond, with Godzilla, the end result would probably be at the expense of the Bond setting. Often, to ensure everyone has fun, it's best not to indulge your creativity.

That's pretty much the perennial pitfall of crossovers. It is very hard to really do justice to both. Typically at least one setting/group of characters get's lessened by the crossover- especially if they are from different genres or work at different power levels, or worse both contain some sort of "higher power" that is supposed to make them supreme, leading to a unstoppable force vs. Immovable object situation. It very hard to handle that while keeping fans of both setting happy.